critiquing your progress….

November 25th, 2007 by chuq

critiquing your progress….

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So one of the things I’ve been doing reecently is going back through my library and re-rating my photos. I finally decided on a new standard for rating them and wanted to bring everything into the new format, plus compare my ratings of older photos to what I consider my standards today.

That latter was both encouraging and scary. Encouraging because it’s obvious the quality of my photos and post-processing has improved a lot in the last year, scary because of what I thought “pretty good” was a year ago.

This was all brought on by a couple of things, one the fact that I was re-arranging everything on my disks anyway, and needed to rethink how I used managed files vs. referenced files in Aperture (again), and partly because I have a secret project I needed to do that had a hard deadline, and that involved going in and finding some of my best photos. The end result of all of the re-arranging, by the way, is that now keep photos I’m actively working on as managed masters inside the Aperture system, and all other photos are in one of two referenced folders — one on the disk, a second on an archive disk that’s offline most of the time for masters of files that have been turned into non-primary images in a set.

I’ve tried using auto-set in Aperture, and I’m just not comfortable with it. Instead, I build sets manually. All of my projects in library are created by-day and by-topic, so if I’ve gone birding in Palo Alto, I’ll store those photos as a project called 2007-11-23 (location). If I do multiple locations in a day, I create multiple projects. Within a project, I create sets of photos that are images of the same thing, which is defined very subjectively (for instance, in a recent shoot, I ended up getting some nice photos of a White-Faced Ibis (finally), and happened to get both left and right profiles. Each is a set within that project, with the best of each profile promoted to represent the set — and the sets are not date-sequenced, because he was moving his head back and forth while preening.)

My rating defintions have finally settled down to this:

***** — my best shots, period

**** — high quality shots, but one step short of awesome

*** — everything I consider worth keeping for some reason or another

** — shots I consider “personal”, basically, my library of “friends and family only” pictures. I do this mostly for convenience, I could keep them in a separate Aperture library if I wanted to (but I don’t).

* — photos that are secondary images of a set.

It’s fairly easy to set this up, FWIW. after I do my first cull, I’ve gotten rid of the dingers and I’ve done a first cut on the sets. you can then open all of the sets, set all images in the project to one star, close sets, select again, and set to 3 stars. Then as you’re doing your post processing and evaluation, higher quality images can be set to 4 or 5 stars.

That allows me to easily select all secondary images in a set and migrate them to the archive disk. the rationale is that I’ve chosen a better image, but want to keep it just in case — but I don’t need immediate or day to day access to them. So off they go to some place safe, but not taking up space on my laptop disk. So far, it seems to be working well.

It also means I can easily find what I consider to be my best shots, which is what I needed for this secret project. I hadn’t planned on spending a couple of days re-rating everything, but once I got into it, I realized it made sense.

so now I have the photo library in some consistently rated. The way I did it was set everything to 3 stars, and then go through everything, rating the better ones as 4 or 5 as I saw fit. Once I got through it, I went through the 5 stars again, and re-rated down ones that in comparison with the other 5′s didn’t hold up, and then did the same with 4′s, rating down or up as I took a closer look in comparison to their peers.

When I was done, I went and looked and the # of photos I rated in what bucket, just to see how it fell. I have a bit over 10,000 photos in my library now, o which 6,200 are secondary images in a set (that’s about 2 images per “primary” image), leaving about 4,000 images as my “library”, or my originals. Of those, about 1,000 (24%) qualify as 2 star “friends and family”;

Of my “working set”, 207 were rated 5 star, 889 were rated 4 star, and 1989 were rated 3 star, or 3085 images. about 7% five star, 29% 4* and the rest three star. I tend to be a severe culler these days, and in fact the next phase for me here is to go through the 3* photos and cull older images I used to think were decent that I now think aren’t up to my standards — I expect to nuke about 10% of the images, roughly. No, I don’t particularly see the reason for keeping a bad image, unless it’s interesting in its uniqueness or it has some other redeeming value (and my vacation snaps of substandard quality life in 2* land anyway; this is my attempting to start building a portfolio I’m not afraid to show anyone, the personal snaps have a different standard)

It’s interesting to me how as I go back in time in the library, fewer and fewer photos make the 4 or 5 star rating, even though at the time I thought they might. that to me is very encouraging as an index of how both my eye and skills are progressing. I think having only 7% of the “keepers” rated 5* tells me I’m not being too liberal in my interpretation, but I think it makes sense to go through this exercise every so often to critically review my work, at least until my sense of “really good” and “top quality” stabilizes.

Another future project that this ties into — I need to go back and re-title, re-caption and re-keyword photos; now, I can start with the 5* and then the 4* and work my way through. I picked up the Aperture keyword library for Controlled Vocabulary a while back and have been experimenting with it, now it’s time to start implementing it for real.

Here’s a photo I thought was good enough to post to Flickr last year (basically, 4* or better):